Clinton's No Guarantee to Bring Votes to Obama

SAN DIEGO -- Some suggest that Barack Obama should pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate because she can help him do something he has trouble doing on his own: winning Latino votes.

I think an Obama-Clinton ticket is a disastrous idea. Even if that combination made it easier for Democrats to win, it would make it impossible for them to govern. There's a certain meddlesome former president who comes with the deal. And how uncomfortable do you suppose it would be to tap as your vice president the person who invoked the assassination of Robert Kennedy to explain why she was staying in the race?

Still, if Obama wants to make the biggest mistake of his so-far charmed political life, that's his prerogative. But he shouldn't do so on our account. Latinos have enough problems these days without being blamed for how this soap opera turns out.

It is true that Obama has struggled with the Hispanic demographic. Just look at Hispanic women, an important subset of that group. According to a recent Gallup poll, 62 percent of them who vote Democratic support Clinton; only 32 percent support Obama. The Clinton brand still holds a lot of appeal for Latinos. Besides, Obama was slow to reach out to those voters, giving his opponent a sizable head start. Hillary took advantage, working that population long and hard to get out the vote.

But it's nothing more sinister than that. Some pundits have implied that Latinos are racist and thus resistant to the idea of supporting a black man for president. That's preposterous, not to mention slanderous. And, curiously, it's a charge you don't often hear leveled at the white women and senior citizens who also preferred Clinton to Obama by wide margins. Why is that?

The idea that Obama can't win Latino votes is a myth -- one that Clinton supporters only perpetuate when they suggest that he needs to choose Clinton as his running mate to win those votes. That's the argument advanced by Rep. Nydia M. Velazquez, D-N.Y., who said recently that Obama's best chance at winning Latino support lies in putting Clinton on the ticket.

She's wrong about this. Such a gesture might be helpful to win over some Latinos, but most of them probably don't consider Obama's choice of a running mate to be a deal-breaker. When all is said and done, most Latinos are going to vote for Obama because most Latinos are going to vote Democratic -- just as they have in every presidential contest since the 1960 Viva Kennedy campaign.

There have been times in the nearly half-century since that race when some Republican presidential candidates have done very well with Latino voters, but not one has broken 50 percent. Ronald Reagan got 40 percent of the Latino vote in 1984, while George W. Bush got an astounding 44 percent in 2004. Others have done poorly. Bob Dole got less than 25 percent of the Latino vote in 1996.

We can expect John McCain -- who garnered as much as 70 percent of the Latino vote in his Arizona Senate races -- to do very well with Latinos against Obama. In fact, early polls suggest he will get as much as 40 percent of the Latino vote in November. But that would still leave Obama with the lion's share of Latino support, whether or not Hillary is on the ticket.

And it's all because of one of the things that worked in Clinton's favor in the primaries: brand loyalty. In this case, it's the Democratic brand to which Latinos are being loyal. The "D" that will appear after Obama's name on the ballot is going to go a long way toward convincing the majority of Latinos to vote for him.

If you ask me, that's a horrible way to pick a president. And it is one reason why, in some elections, Latinos risk being taken for granted by Democrats and written off by Republicans. I'd prefer that Latinos keep their options open, enjoy the attention, pose tough questions about issues, look for someone compatible with their values, and then choose carefully.

The same advice applies to Barack Obama as he goes about picking his running mate -- a process in which he should feel free to scratch one name off the list.